Partisan fireworks at Libya hearing

Partisan fireworks erupted Wednesday at a House hearing on the Benghazi attacks that left the U.S. ambassador to Libya dead and vaulted the issue of national security to the forefront of the presidential campaign.

Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sharply criticized the Obama administration for its fluctuating explanation of the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three diplomatic personnel.

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“Any reasonable person …. had to come to the conclusion that it was tumultuous at best,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said of the security situation in Libya.

“We now know that, in fact, it was caused by a terrorist attack that was reasonably predictable,” said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

Wednesday’s highly anticipated hearing came as the State Department disclosed for the first time that it never concluded that the consulate attack was fueled by furor over an anti-Islam video circulating on YouTube — an explanation that congressional Republicans have long publicly doubted.

In recent weeks, Republicans have ramped up pressure on administration officials for more clarity on details surrounding the Benghazi assault, which came on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and has turned into a political issue.

Coming under a barrage of criticism was Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who said in the days immediately following Stevens’s death that the attacks appeared to be a “spontaneous” protest of an anti-Muslim video, rather than a premeditated terrorist attack. One top House Republican — Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.) — is demanding Rice’s resignation.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) asked Issa to call Rice as a witness at a future hearing.

“I’d like to have another hearing where we can ask Ambassador Rice, under oath, ‘Who told you what, when?’” Gowdy said. “… I want to know why we were lied to.”

Issa said the panel plans to pursue issues raised at the hearing and elsewhere, including how Rice could have said what she did on TV after the attacks.

A top State Department official came to Rice’s defense at the hearing.

”If I or any other senior administration official … would have been on that television show other than Susan Rice, we would’ve said the same thing because we were drawing on the same intelligence information,” said Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management at the State Department.

Last week, Issa and Chaffetz released a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, detailing 13 security threats to U.S. diplomatic officials in Libya and how requests for additional security were rejected, according to the lawmakers.

But despite previous threats in Libya, one security official testified that additional security may not have helped. State Department officials testified that there were five diplomatic security agents on the Benghazi compound during the attacks, along with three Libyan security officials.

“The ferocity and intensity of the attack was nothing that we had seen in Libya, or that I had seen in my time in the Diplomatic Security Service,” said Eric Nordstrom, a regional security officer at State. “Having an extra foot of wall, or an extra-half dozen guard or agents would not have enabled us to respond to that kind of assault.”

Democrats have had their own criticisms in the fallout from the attack.

Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings accused Issa of leading a one-sided investigation, alleging that Issa withheld documents and refused to give Democrats access to a key committee witness. Cummings said Democrats could “not even get [the witness’] phone number.”

“It’s a shame that they are resorting to such petty abuses in what should be a serious and responsible investigation of this fatal attack,” Cummings said in his opening remarks.